"Practicing on the ISS simulator for the arrival of the 1st commercial spacecraft, SpaceX's Dragon, early May."

That's the ROBoT - the Robotics On Board Trainer. It's basically a lower fidelity Robotics Workstation (RWS - used to control the real arm), but instead of controlling the real arm, it controls a virtual arm on a laptop screen.

Up until the press conference April 30th is still a NET time. I would suspect a basic go no go though at this time. Either way unless something is way wrong or Dragon simply needs more testing, I would think that the BASIC time frame will hold. There is no accounting for last minute delays. Although I'm not a L2 subscriber, I'm hearing rumors about stressing the NET portion. I hope to join up this next week just in time for pre launch activities. Tax issues for me have had to come first, unfortunately.

Yeah, have to wait for the FRR to be sure, but even if April 30th stays, the launch window is instantaneous (and weather is not always cooperative, neither are sailors), so there's a pretty good chance of a scrub and launching in early May anyway.

« Last Edit: 04/13/2012 06:06 PM by Robotbeat »

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Chris Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Elon Musk on NASA approval of Dragon -" it has to go through a very rigorous set of safety and reliability requirements and pass all those, WHICH WE JUST GOT OUR APPROVAL LAST WEEK. That was the toughest thing."

Is this activity based on an assumption that the mission flies as scheduled, or has the decision already been made and NASA are simply waiting for the appropriate committees to rubber-stamp it?

I would assume it moving the SSRMS into position, since it is something that needs to be done, was simply convenient to do now, and that they don't have any other high priority robotic ops planned that would require it to position elsewhere. There's little reason not get simple tasks like this out of the way early

The final launch decision is, as always, dependent on the reviews, both at NASA and less formally at SpaceX. It's not a rubber-stamping formality, but part of everyone involved making sure everything is really ready.